Hearts of Iron IV

Hello everyone, and welcome to the 14th development diary. I’m Johan, and I got dragged into this devdiary writing thingie today because of a curse.. We have lost a few members of the team to the dreaded “holiday”-curse, including podcat & doomdark, but we hope to have them back in a wee while. In the last few months, we’ve spent quite a lot of time going through features, and redesigning those that did not improve the game significantly enough from the previous iterations of the series.

One of those features that went the way of the dodo was the goals system. The goals system did not have a visible progression, it did not have clear instructions to the player, and was constantly mixing between things happening because you selected a goal, or things you had to do to fulfill the goal. This was not acceptable for a feature in a modern PDS game, so we soaked our brains in the nectar of the gods for a while, and came up with a new system, which according to our QA team, “Is very very fun”, and also creates replayability.

Now its time for us, without further ado, to introduce the National Focus system.
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Hi everyone, time for a smoking fresh diary! This time I am going to go through some of the things we showed in the PdxCon stream in more detail.

One of our important design goals for HOI4 is to make you feel like you are growing and nurturing your army as well as putting more focus into pre-war production. We have showed how its important to build up stockpiles of equipment for your army prior to war and get efficiency up for your production lines and we have talked about how you need to gain and spend experience to modify your divisional templates for the army. So whats left? The soft part of the division - the guys who actually does the fighting in the divisions! We wanted you to be able to affect them more as well, and have the effects be more visible.

Conscription and manpower

Manpower will see some big changes in HOI4. Rather than controlling only how much it ticks up per month your conscription laws now control what percentage of the population you can recruit from the full population count. Conscription laws also come with trade-offs in that recruiting more will impact efficiency of your industry and as you dig deeper and starts scraping the barrel of recruits their quality will drop requiring more training time to reach the same level of proficiency. The idea is to make it less clear cut than in hoi3 where more men was always best at all times.
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Hey everyone! As Podcat said in the latest developer diary, we plan to release Hearts of Iron IV late Q2 2015:http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...ernal-Politics
While waiting for the game, make sure you have read all the developer diaries and watched all the livestream videos so you are prepared

Hi everyone,
we are now back from holidays and hard at work making games, so it's time for another dev diary. In this one we are going to talk about internal politics as well as give you an update on project schedule for Hearts of Iron IV.

Political Power
Political power is a new currency in Hearts of Iron IV. It models how much control you as a ruler have over things. Political power is gained over time automatically, but there are also ways of gaining more quicker, which brings us to National Goals.

National Goals
A national goal is something you set up as a promise or mission to the nation. Picking one will cost you political power, but you'll usually get it back plus more reward if you can show that you were able to accomplish it. It might be a specific historical goal (which is a great way of pointing the AI in the right direction btw) or something more lose, like a campaign of improving the nations roads.
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Meet the Tanks and Vehicles of World War II in a New Developer Diary Video

STOCKHOLM — November 20, 2014 — Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio today released a new developer diary video for Hearts of Iron IV, the upcoming World War II strategy game for Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs. The video features a visit to the “Arsenalen” museum of military vehicles in Sweden, where Hearts of Iron IV’s Project Lead, Dan Lind, invites eager commanders to join him on a tour of how different tanks were used to turn the tide of war – and how different nations pursued tactics of quality vs. quantity.

This tour is connected to new game discussion and in-game footage as details about industry, war experience and vehicle production are revealed.

Welcome to the art portion of Hearts of iron 4(HOI4) dev diary series. This diary will focus on the visual aesthetics of the game and sexy graphic-stuff.
My name is Joakim Larsen and Im a 3D artist working with the HOI4 team on giving players of HOI4 the most visual pleasure out of the game.

Today we are happy to show some of the work we have done on the graphic side of HOI4.
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Hi everyone! It's time to start talking about how the naval aspects of the game are changing with Hearts of Iron IV. There are a lot of aspects of naval gameplay, so we will be splitting this up in several diaries. Strategic warfare and details on missions will be in later diaries. This one will focus on direct combat and the general idea.

We had a few goals when designing naval mechanics for HOI4. We wanted it to both be able to handle the case of German surface raider ships relying on firepower and speed to tie up a large portion of the royal navy with a few ships like what happened early on in the war and the massive naval battles of the pacific between Japan and USA. We also wanted different ship types to be able to interact with each other and not make, say, convoy raiding a completely separate system.

What makes naval action so different from land is that the position of everything is not precisely known. So just because you know there is a German ship in a sea zone doesn't mean you can find it before it leaves.
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Hello guys and gals! Most of the HOI4 team is currently on a much needed summer vacation, but we figured we couldn't just leave you hanging without a diary this month, so let's get to it *puts down beer* *cracks knuckles*.

The Air Technology tree is similar to the Armor tech tree we showed back in diary 2 in that we are focusing around chassis and unlocking specific historical equipment/models that those versed in WWII will be familiar with.
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Hi! This week is going to be a pretty short diary because we are all super busy preparing for Gamescom and Paradox Fan Gathering in Cologne, but because we are physically addicted to stress hormones at this point we love our fans we decided to squeeze one in anyway.
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Once again it is time for a Hearts of Iron Dev Diary! This time I'm going to talk about how Air Combat has changed, and boy, it sure has changed! In earlier HoI games, air units were all "wings", a grouping of a non-specific amount (but notionally around 100) planes which you could order to carry out missions in an area or targeting a specific province. In HoI4 we no longer use only wings; each plane is an individual piece of equipment, and rather than give each one orders, you give orders to your air bases to send a certain number of planes on missions to a given Strategic Region.
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Hello, and welcome back to another Hearts of Iron IV developer diary! Today I'm going to talk about the new Division Designer we're making. In a Hearts of Iron game, you spend a lot of time with your Division, and being able to customise them gave it a personal touch - You're not just using any Infantry Division, your using you're patented Infantry/Tank Destroyer/Artillery combination which makes them winning a battle all the more satisfying.
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It's time for another Hearts of Iron IV Developer Diary, and this time I'm going to talk a bit more about production; specifically the Production Lines and How Things Get Built. All military equipment is made on Production Lines in HoI IV, so players will need to be familiar with how they work if they want to maximize their war machine.

But before we can talk about the production lines themselves, we should cover how Industry has changed in HoI IV.
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Hello! It's time for another Hearts of Iron 4 Developer Diary, and this one is about Land Doctrines. For HoI4, we are leaning more towards the Doctrine paths you may remember from HoI2 than the mix-and-match of HoI3. We have 4 main mutually exclusive Doctrine paths which nations can research. Each path also has one or more mutually exclusive choices to further differentiate the doctrines and sub-doctrines.
Because we are still pre-alpha, I can't really describe exactly what each tech in the tree does at the moment; this can and will change as we implement, test and iterate over them. I can describe the general idea behind each path and choice so hopefully you will understand what we are aiming for.
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One of our main goals with HoI 4 has been to simplify things to appeal to a more mainstream audience without sacrificing historical appeal. Initially this seemed impossible until the recent release of Call of Duty: Ghosts. The key to the success of Ghosts was the inclusion of Riley, a dog companion and playable character. Immediately the solution was clear: Popular games have dogs, and as everyone knows Hitler was famously a dog-lover, so the National Dog concept was born.
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Welcome to the second development diary for Hearts of Iron IV! Today, I am going dive right into the meaty stuff and present one of the larger changes we've made to the game - equipment. It's a broad topic with many implications for how the rest of the game is played, so my goal is to present the general idea without digging into all the details just yet. But don't worry, there will be more details than you can shake a field-marshal's baton at in future diaries!

Production
We wanted a more interesting industry model that offered a compelling reason not to always use the latest technology, as well as adding more unit flavor in HoI4. To accomplish this we developed a model where you no longer build full divisions and aircraft wings one at a time; instead, you create production lines to pump out individual vehicles.
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